Hey Permanauts! Before you do anything else, click this link to follow along for more permaculture experiments: th-cam.com/channels/tWvHnhwXkrPQu5wrYKgggQ.html What are your favorite polycultures? What are some new ones you want to experiment with? Do you think my achira/runner bean/Florida betony guild will fail? Be sure to check the description for links to the resources mentioned in the video.
I use roots and tubers (potatoes, sweet potatoes, sunchokes) to put organics into the soil in food forest areas. I don't dig them, just let them rot there over the winter to help fix the soil. Potatoes and sunchokes just overwinter and come back. I replant the sweet potatoes every year.
I had a temperate yam die last year with our drought. Man, the soil where it rotted was amazing. I was up my elbow in dark, rich, beautiful soil and never found the end of it. Which makes me think that yam berries might actually be a good soil improvement strategy here where I know they'll die in the summer without irrigation.
Justamente iba a mencionar "Lost crops of the Incas". De hecho, la Achira fue uno de los cultivos más importante en el sitio arqueológico de Caral en Perú, con 5.000 años de antigüedad. Lo que estás haciendo prácticamente es SAF o Sistemas Agro Forestales, una técnica creada por el suizo Ernst Gotsch en el Brasil, donde se difunde activamente. Puedes hallar abundantes videos al respecto.
For sure! Lots of SAF inspiration in what I'm doing. Lots of SAF, and KNF, and ZBNF, and all manner of other systems, all mashed together. And this is the first year I've had enough achira to start eating it! It's been really rewarding! Thanks for watching!
i had a similar idea recently, im planning on planting 3 'wild' varieties of sunchoke (trying to breed them) as the overstory with one variety getting 10 feet tall and the others getting around 6, a purple potato as the herbaceous/ground cover layer with vines that grow to like a foot before they start leaning on the gound and reach about 3 feet, sweet potatoes and maybe hog peanut for ground cover, and runner beans as well as chinese yam for the vines. id probably grow ground nut (apios americana) and mashua and crosnes if i had them but we'll see how crazy things get with just what i have. myabe it will be a complete flop, maybe it will bust apart the bed with all the tubers, we'll see.
Genius! I'm working on developing a guild that can coexist with rhizomateous grass which gets 6 feet tall lmao. You bringing trees and tubers together gives me a lot of hope!
Well, it's an experiment. Still plenty of time for it to go horribly wrong. Haha. Those grasses are no joke. Right now I'm trying to find the path of least resistance in dealing with these thistles... but ignoring the grass is probably going to bite me in the end.
Es posible, si ésas gramas las podas. Hay interesantes vídeos para climas cálidos empleando pastos africanos. Mayormente en el Brasil, por ejemplo en el canal CEPEAS. También se utilizan árboles leguminosas como la Gliciridia. El secreto consiste en que tanto los pastos como los árboles son podados antes de sembrar los cultivos. La biomasa es aplicada al suelo como mulch y las podas estimulan el crecimiento de los cultivos.
Good stuff! I am embarrassed to say that I have only grown one of those three plants (scarlet runner beans)! Looks like I've got some catching up to do! 🙃
Of the three, runner beans are the only ones I have direct experience with, and I've had mixed results-they flower like crazy, but we get too hot too fast for them to produce, except in a brief window going into fall. I have a broader mix of genetics this year so I'm hoping I can start selecting for stronger dry bean production. Discovered Achira and crosnes when I got Eric's book, however many years ago that's been now. Hadn't been able to get either of those plants before this year when I got a hookup from an old friend at the Camp Cowell Permaculture Project in Michigan. It's Bill Whitson at Cultivariable that promoted Florida Betony as a promising alternative to crosnes. Guess we'll find out. Rick Larson has a lot of great cold climate achira videos. Highly recommended.
@@stonedapefarmer I didn't have any luck with them at all until I learned to place them in part shade. Since then I've realized what great producers they can be. Maybe as your canopy layer grows up, you'll have more chances to get some good bean production from them. I also grow white runner beans, which I like a little better but which are less productive - only one or two beans per pod. There are better varieties out there, but I'm too cheap to buy them. Serves me right, then, I guess! ;)
@@karlsfoodforestgarden6963 Yeah. I'm hoping the achira will help shade them and help them produce a little better. Not really any other shade on the property yet. But one of them is actually a mix of varieties from a local seed supplier, so I anticipate they're a little better adapted. My mashua also isn't going to like it when our summer sun is at its hottest either. I'm going to experiment with interplanting it with Malabar spinach, which will love the heat, and can be cut back heavily once we start cooling off again
I'm not sure if you're making fun of my pronunciation or if this is a genuine questions. 🤣 Taro "root" is technically a culm, I believe. Popular vegetable in Hawaii. I think it's used throughout Polynesian and SE Asian cuisine. Don't quote me on that. Related to the ornamental elephant ears you can get at nurseries. It's been a while since I've had any fresh, but I want to say it has kind of a sweet and nutting flavor going one. Potato-y texture, but maybe slightly mucilaginous... but nothing like okra.
@@stonedapefarmer not at all! It sounded familiar, yet I couldn't place it! Or find it. Lol. Cause my guess at spelling is apparently not good. Lol. I have seen a couple of permaculture videos on Hawaii and they did mention it..... Actually the first one that turned me on to permaculture.....but that was probably a dozen years ago. It was a lady that turned her Hawaiian backyard into a permaculture space for homeschooling.... And she mentioned it as one of the ways the islands had fed themselves before importing so much food and such. I know paw paw trees are one of those kinds of native producers here in northern Indiana, but am struggling to actually get my hand on some saplings. I'm struggling with the idea of so much of an energy input on a regular basis with this type of guild, but totally understand the yield aspect.
@@GoingGreenMom Maybe it's just because this stuff can over winter in the ground here, but this is the least energy intensive of anything I've done to make sure I don't starve this year, and it'll be even less energy going forward. Pop them out of the ground as I want to eat them, otherwise they fend for themselves and grow back year after year. Like sunchokes, but less monoculture-y. Maybe some supplemental mulch for the nutrition, and a little extra helping of the regular ol' household waste. Have you seen Paul Gautschi's potatoes? It's basically an iteration on that. The man can barely walk and still manages to make it look easy. 🤣 I don't suppose you remember the name of that channel? Sounds amazing. I think it's KSU that has a free pawpaw seed program. They only have a limited number each month, but they're free. All of mine died, but that's because I didn't know they were sent pre-stratified and they sat around in a baggie for like 9 months trying to grow before I found a spot for them. As long as you're not picky about genetics, and have time to grow from seed, that's a great way to go.
@@stonedapefarmer unfortunately that video wasn't on here. If you Google "Vimeo Akamai Backyard", I think it will come up. Now I am curious I thought you were in a northern state somewhere which would indicate needing to dig everything up? I have some seed from the one I got to try, but talking to the person that gifted me the fruit, they are about 15 years from seed to fruiting tree on his property.
@@GoingGreenMom Yeah. That's quite a wait. 15 years might be too much. And nope. I'm in the part of Oregon that's in the pink on the map, between the mountains and the coast. Protects us from the really hard freezes, but we have 40-ish degree temperature swings in the summer, so we can't grow the stuff that likes warm nights... sweet potatoes, melons, okra, etc. And we have 3-4 months of drought right at the peak of the growing season... though it started 2 months early this year. It's a weird climate unlike anywhere else in the country, that's for sure. And growing food takes some amount of energy. Once you pick fruit it has to be preserved, and you can't live off of fruit alone. Nuts have to be gathered and shelled. Grains take the most energy of all, between the harvesting, threshing, and winnowing... possibly milling after all of that. Tubers and rhizomes just sit their and wait. Throw them in a basement or unheated garage and eat on them. No preservation required. Technically no peeling required for most of them. And no more harvesting than anything else. And really, if you see people's no-till potato patches, it really is just pulling up the plant and all the tubers come with, or very nearly. As long as you can keep the humidity up and temperature down, even if you have to bring them in for winter, most tubers will last you a solid year, though the quality might be better if preserved before that. Charles Dowding had a great video this past year I think on eating potatoes that he'd harvested 11 months earlier, and they were just shoved in an unheated shed, I think. It's now almost 9 months since all of this stuff was harvested, or at least ready to harvest, and it's just now started to sprout. Still plenty of good eating, or just put whatever's left back in the ground. Ugh. I'm ready to be able to do a harvest video. I don't think words can really do justice to how much easier tubers are than nuts, grains, or fruit for the winter larder, so to speak. That'll be November-ish. Give or take, depending on what kind of year we have.
Hey Permanauts! Before you do anything else, click this link to follow along for more permaculture experiments: th-cam.com/channels/tWvHnhwXkrPQu5wrYKgggQ.html
What are your favorite polycultures? What are some new ones you want to experiment with? Do you think my achira/runner bean/Florida betony guild will fail?
Be sure to check the description for links to the resources mentioned in the video.
I like the way you think sir. Much more practical and systematic than some other permie folks.
I use roots and tubers (potatoes, sweet potatoes, sunchokes) to put organics into the soil in food forest areas. I don't dig them, just let them rot there over the winter to help fix the soil. Potatoes and sunchokes just overwinter and come back. I replant the sweet potatoes every year.
I had a temperate yam die last year with our drought. Man, the soil where it rotted was amazing. I was up my elbow in dark, rich, beautiful soil and never found the end of it.
Which makes me think that yam berries might actually be a good soil improvement strategy here where I know they'll die in the summer without irrigation.
Justamente iba a mencionar "Lost crops of the Incas". De hecho, la Achira fue uno de los cultivos más importante en el sitio arqueológico de Caral en Perú, con 5.000 años de antigüedad.
Lo que estás haciendo prácticamente es SAF o Sistemas Agro Forestales, una técnica creada por el suizo Ernst Gotsch en el Brasil, donde se difunde activamente. Puedes hallar abundantes videos al respecto.
For sure! Lots of SAF inspiration in what I'm doing. Lots of SAF, and KNF, and ZBNF, and all manner of other systems, all mashed together. And this is the first year I've had enough achira to start eating it! It's been really rewarding! Thanks for watching!
i had a similar idea recently, im planning on planting 3 'wild' varieties of sunchoke (trying to breed them) as the overstory with one variety getting 10 feet tall and the others getting around 6, a purple potato as the herbaceous/ground cover layer with vines that grow to like a foot before they start leaning on the gound and reach about 3 feet, sweet potatoes and maybe hog peanut for ground cover, and runner beans as well as chinese yam for the vines. id probably grow ground nut (apios americana) and mashua and crosnes if i had them but we'll see how crazy things get with just what i have. myabe it will be a complete flop, maybe it will bust apart the bed with all the tubers, we'll see.
Genius! I'm working on developing a guild that can coexist with rhizomateous grass which gets 6 feet tall lmao.
You bringing trees and tubers together gives me a lot of hope!
Well, it's an experiment. Still plenty of time for it to go horribly wrong. Haha.
Those grasses are no joke. Right now I'm trying to find the path of least resistance in dealing with these thistles... but ignoring the grass is probably going to bite me in the end.
Es posible, si ésas gramas las podas. Hay interesantes vídeos para climas cálidos empleando pastos africanos. Mayormente en el Brasil, por ejemplo en el canal CEPEAS. También se utilizan árboles leguminosas como la Gliciridia. El secreto consiste en que tanto los pastos como los árboles son podados antes de sembrar los cultivos. La biomasa es aplicada al suelo como mulch y las podas estimulan el crecimiento de los cultivos.
@@andresamplonius315 I have intuitively been doing something like that and will be doing more as I have more and more biomass!
Good stuff! I am embarrassed to say that I have only grown one of those three plants (scarlet runner beans)! Looks like I've got some catching up to do! 🙃
Of the three, runner beans are the only ones I have direct experience with, and I've had mixed results-they flower like crazy, but we get too hot too fast for them to produce, except in a brief window going into fall. I have a broader mix of genetics this year so I'm hoping I can start selecting for stronger dry bean production.
Discovered Achira and crosnes when I got Eric's book, however many years ago that's been now. Hadn't been able to get either of those plants before this year when I got a hookup from an old friend at the Camp Cowell Permaculture Project in Michigan.
It's Bill Whitson at Cultivariable that promoted Florida Betony as a promising alternative to crosnes. Guess we'll find out.
Rick Larson has a lot of great cold climate achira videos. Highly recommended.
@@stonedapefarmer I didn't have any luck with them at all until I learned to place them in part shade. Since then I've realized what great producers they can be. Maybe as your canopy layer grows up, you'll have more chances to get some good bean production from them. I also grow white runner beans, which I like a little better but which are less productive - only one or two beans per pod. There are better varieties out there, but I'm too cheap to buy them. Serves me right, then, I guess! ;)
@@karlsfoodforestgarden6963 Yeah. I'm hoping the achira will help shade them and help them produce a little better. Not really any other shade on the property yet.
But one of them is actually a mix of varieties from a local seed supplier, so I anticipate they're a little better adapted.
My mashua also isn't going to like it when our summer sun is at its hottest either. I'm going to experiment with interplanting it with Malabar spinach, which will love the heat, and can be cut back heavily once we start cooling off again
@@stonedapefarmer Sounds like a reasonable plan. I look forward to seeing how it goes!
Hey Karl! You still around? Finally getting to my backlog now that food is sorted. 😅
What is tearo root?
I'm not sure if you're making fun of my pronunciation or if this is a genuine questions. 🤣
Taro "root" is technically a culm, I believe. Popular vegetable in Hawaii. I think it's used throughout Polynesian and SE Asian cuisine. Don't quote me on that. Related to the ornamental elephant ears you can get at nurseries. It's been a while since I've had any fresh, but I want to say it has kind of a sweet and nutting flavor going one. Potato-y texture, but maybe slightly mucilaginous... but nothing like okra.
@@stonedapefarmer not at all! It sounded familiar, yet I couldn't place it! Or find it. Lol. Cause my guess at spelling is apparently not good. Lol. I have seen a couple of permaculture videos on Hawaii and they did mention it..... Actually the first one that turned me on to permaculture.....but that was probably a dozen years ago. It was a lady that turned her Hawaiian backyard into a permaculture space for homeschooling.... And she mentioned it as one of the ways the islands had fed themselves before importing so much food and such. I know paw paw trees are one of those kinds of native producers here in northern Indiana, but am struggling to actually get my hand on some saplings. I'm struggling with the idea of so much of an energy input on a regular basis with this type of guild, but totally understand the yield aspect.
@@GoingGreenMom Maybe it's just because this stuff can over winter in the ground here, but this is the least energy intensive of anything I've done to make sure I don't starve this year, and it'll be even less energy going forward. Pop them out of the ground as I want to eat them, otherwise they fend for themselves and grow back year after year. Like sunchokes, but less monoculture-y. Maybe some supplemental mulch for the nutrition, and a little extra helping of the regular ol' household waste. Have you seen Paul Gautschi's potatoes? It's basically an iteration on that. The man can barely walk and still manages to make it look easy. 🤣
I don't suppose you remember the name of that channel? Sounds amazing.
I think it's KSU that has a free pawpaw seed program. They only have a limited number each month, but they're free. All of mine died, but that's because I didn't know they were sent pre-stratified and they sat around in a baggie for like 9 months trying to grow before I found a spot for them. As long as you're not picky about genetics, and have time to grow from seed, that's a great way to go.
@@stonedapefarmer unfortunately that video wasn't on here. If you Google "Vimeo Akamai Backyard", I think it will come up. Now I am curious I thought you were in a northern state somewhere which would indicate needing to dig everything up? I have some seed from the one I got to try, but talking to the person that gifted me the fruit, they are about 15 years from seed to fruiting tree on his property.
@@GoingGreenMom Yeah. That's quite a wait. 15 years might be too much.
And nope. I'm in the part of Oregon that's in the pink on the map, between the mountains and the coast. Protects us from the really hard freezes, but we have 40-ish degree temperature swings in the summer, so we can't grow the stuff that likes warm nights... sweet potatoes, melons, okra, etc. And we have 3-4 months of drought right at the peak of the growing season... though it started 2 months early this year. It's a weird climate unlike anywhere else in the country, that's for sure.
And growing food takes some amount of energy. Once you pick fruit it has to be preserved, and you can't live off of fruit alone. Nuts have to be gathered and shelled. Grains take the most energy of all, between the harvesting, threshing, and winnowing... possibly milling after all of that.
Tubers and rhizomes just sit their and wait. Throw them in a basement or unheated garage and eat on them. No preservation required. Technically no peeling required for most of them. And no more harvesting than anything else. And really, if you see people's no-till potato patches, it really is just pulling up the plant and all the tubers come with, or very nearly. As long as you can keep the humidity up and temperature down, even if you have to bring them in for winter, most tubers will last you a solid year, though the quality might be better if preserved before that. Charles Dowding had a great video this past year I think on eating potatoes that he'd harvested 11 months earlier, and they were just shoved in an unheated shed, I think. It's now almost 9 months since all of this stuff was harvested, or at least ready to harvest, and it's just now started to sprout. Still plenty of good eating, or just put whatever's left back in the ground.
Ugh. I'm ready to be able to do a harvest video. I don't think words can really do justice to how much easier tubers are than nuts, grains, or fruit for the winter larder, so to speak. That'll be November-ish. Give or take, depending on what kind of year we have.
Permaculture porn! I just planted achira and it is beautiful!